City Judge Joseph A. Fiorella on Monday gave prosecutors the legal green light to seek a hate-crime indictment against Suzanne-Deanna Grover in the Jan. 1 stabbing that could cost Lindsay C. Harmon her right eye.

The judge ordered Grover, 21, held for grand jury action after an hour-long hearing at which Harmon, 29, testified that Grover stabbed her from behind, and Buffalo Detective Timothy Rooney testified that Grover admitted the attack.

Michael J. Flaherty Jr., chief prosecutor in the alleged hate-crime case, said grand jury action will begin within the next 45 days. Grover did not testify Monday.

Flaherty declined to comment further after admitting Grover had been flown back to Buffalo from her new home in Florida to testify at the murder trial of her boyfriend’s killer last month. He refused to say where in Florida she lived.

Grover was arrested in the stabbing after that Jan. 20 testimony.

Jerome Thagard, 17, was convicted Jan. 25 of second-degree murder and weapons charges for the fatal shooting of Grover’s boyfriend, Steven Northrup, 31, on April 29 in a field near the Shaffer Village housing complex in Buffalo’s Riverside.

Rooney testified that when he and fellow Central District Detective Edward Cotter questioned Grover following her testimony, she admitted she stabbed Harmon after “a verbal altercation” escalated outside Roxie’s nightclub downtown.

Harmon, who still has her right eye covered in a protective bandage, told the judge she was talking with one of her two girlfriends outside Roxie’s when Grover “out of the blue called me a [expletive deleted].”

Harmon said she tried to break up an altercation that had developed between her two friends and Grover and her friends and that Grover repeatedly used a sexual slur before stabbing her.

She told the judge she had never met Grover before the incident.

Fiorella rejected a request from Grover’s lawyer, Debra K. Bender, to either dismiss the case or lower Grover’s bail.

Bender told the judge Grover’s mother is arranging to have her daughter’s 4-year-old son brought back to Buffalo from Florida to be with his mother, but the judge refused to lower the $75,000 bail that is keeping her in custody. He said there are “too many convoluted facts” to make a snap judgment.

Flaherty had insisted that Grover is a “real flight risk” because she now lives in Florida.

Fiorella told Bender she will have to petition a higher-level judge to seek lower bail.